I never know what I mean in my telegrams – especially those I send from America. Clearness is too expensive.
Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.
He has depths of silence – which he breaks only at the longest intervals by a remark. And when the remark comes it’s always something he has seen or felt for himself – never a bit banal. That would be what one might have feared and what would kill me. But never.
I want to see what life makes of you. One thing is certain – it can’t spoil you. It may pull you about horribly, but I defy it to break you up.
And she really had tones to make justice weep.
Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t, and what one “would” have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of things.
I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little seesaw of the right throbs and the wrong.
I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.
What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn’t last as suspense – it was superseded by horrible proofs.
It was as if, at moments, we were perpetually coming into sight of subjects before which we must stop short, turning suddenly out of alleys that we perceived to be blind, closing with a little bang that made us look at each other – for, like all bangs, it was something louder than we had intended – the doors we had indiscreetly opened.
No,’ she sadly insisted – ’men don’t know. They know in such matters almost nothing but what women show them.
If you look for grand examples of anything from me, I shall disappoint you.
It was the tragic part of happiness; one’s right was always made of the wrong of some one else.
He knew there were disappointments that lasted as long as life.
I had not gone to bed; I sat reading by a couple of candles. There was a roomful of old books at Bly – last-century fiction, some of it, which, to the extent of a distinctly deprecated renown, but never to so much as that of a stray specimen, had reached the sequestered home and appealed to the unavowed curiosity of my youth.
A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.
I might show it to you, but you’d never see it. The privilege isn’t given to every one; it’s not enviable. It has never been seen by a young, happy, innocent person like you. You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it.
It was not that I didn’t wait, on this occasion, for more, for I was rooted as deeply as I was shaken. Was there a “secret” at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?
We see our lives from our own point of view; that is the privilege of the weakest and humblest of us;.
I don’t talk for your amusement.